eCampushttp://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus
San Jose State UniversityTue, 19 Feb 2019 02:08:00 +0000en-UShourly1http://blogs.sjsu.edu/?v=4.8.8But How Do I Begin in Digital Pedagogy?http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/2019/02/18/but-how-do-i-begin-in-digital-pedagogy/
http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/2019/02/18/but-how-do-i-begin-in-digital-pedagogy/#respondMon, 18 Feb 2019 16:11:42 +0000http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/?p=322In the last post, “It’s Not About the Tools,” we got a look inside the pedagogical theories behind a collaborative, project-based learning environment in a Humanities course. Students were offered a broad research question at the outset and an established goal. But, as you can see, that goal had to change due to resources and the […]]]>

In the last post, “It’s Not About the Tools,” we got a look inside the pedagogical theories behind a collaborative, project-based learning environment in a Humanities course. Students were offered a broad research question at the outset and an established goal. But, as you can see, that goal had to change due to resources and the needs of the project. Since no one had written about Beardstair prior to this course, or, more accurately, publicized/published a piece on its process and progress, the graduate students deemed it appropriate and in line with Digital Humanities scholarship to publish a history and process piece.

In that post, I gestured towards the technology, but the technology did not govern the course. In fact, the students offered a critique of the digital tools, their failings, and their limitations foisted onto the project. The seamless tech, blogs, Facebook groups, Google Docs, photography, were used for the purpose of collaboration and documenting the progress. A Facebook group was established by the student teams (Tech Team & Literature Team) as the easiest form of facilitating constant contact — primarily because of the seamless integration between mobile and laptop platforms along with notifications of recent postings to their groups. (They discuss this choice for collaboration space in their peer-reviewed article for the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, “BeardStair: A Student-Run Digital Humanities Project History, Fall 2011 to May 16, 2013.)

In several workshops that I’ve run for various types of universities and colleges in North America, including the Digital Humanities Summer Institute workshop on Digital Pedagogy, I always ask instructors to write down responses to the following prompts before even thinking about integrating digital tools into their courses:

Is the process and/or outcome public to the world or just to the students?

Where does the assignment fit into the semester (1st assignment? last one?)?

Where does the assignment fit with your larger goals for the course?

How will you build on the knowledge or a skill from this assignment?

What resources are required to complete the assignment? (access to subscription databases?)

What technical proficiencies are required by the student?

Do you require a lab day for learning technologies or presenting process/final projects? (make sure to leave time in the schedule)

Will the work be done in class or out?

How will you engage with this assignment (process and/or outcome) during class discussion?

Have you left room for waypoints/check-in moments for the assignment (especially relevant for assignments that come later in the semester or require several steps)?

How does this assignment differ from previous assignments that don’t use technology?

Can you boil the project down to a single research question for your students?

This series of questions should lead the instructor to the type of assignment; not all assignments need to be graded, high stakes. Use of digital media and tools can afford students an opportunity to “screw around,” experiment, and explore with your guidance.

Consider then which of the types of assignments you would like to employ to develop a skill or lead into another critical thinking activity or be part of a larger, scaffolded assignment:

Single Day (bloom & fade)

Single Assignment

Entire Course (scaffolded assigned)

Bloom & Fade

This type of assignment occurs within the confines of the classroom meeting session and doesn’t necessarily result in an assignment to be completed by students beyond the time of the meeting. This is an ungraded, low-stakes, exploratory activity. But, you can use digital media and tools to help you with this.

I’ve written a fair amount about the use of digital tools in a literature class over the years, specifically for Norton Publishers on their Fairmatter blog a few years ago (entire list of blog posts available here). The most fruitful, and playful, in-class activities came from playing with new tech, specifically Google’s NGram Viewer and GNook. In much of my work, I attempt to knock through the traditional literary canon to demonstrate the overwhelming amount of reading materials available during the British Romantic and Victorian periods (1775-1901). To get students outside of their anthologies, they need to explore beyond the confines of editorial control. Both NGram and GNook do that. For the activities used and the outcomes, take a look at these 2 posts:

Single Day Assignments

Digital tools don’t have to be the focus of using digital tools. I used blogs (via WordPress) to allow students an opportunity to construct and explore writings that include visual media, especially photos that they take with their own cell phones to demonstrate their understanding of the visual cues and critical thinking required of visual media. (The 19th century was rife with visual media and therefore integral to study beyond the pages of an anthology.) Check out these assignments that began as a “bloom and fade”:

Scaffolded Project-Based Assignments

This type of lengthy set of assignments that build skills with each assignment, but are linked by a research question takes the most planning, especially in terms of integrating some days to teach technical skills (even with low-barrier to entry tools).

NOW – PICK THE TOOLS!

With all of this in mind, now you can take a look at the tools. If you need a sophisticated set of tools that interacts with each other, you might take a look at the Adobe Suite that IT has gotten all students and faculty access to: Adobe Creative Cloud.

Do you know what you’re doing already and want to share more, see the Professional Development Opportunities (including local conferences on Student Success) available through eCampus. These opportunities are also organized into tracks:

New Adventurer Track: A track for instructors who are newer to San Jose State or to Canvas and/or educational technology in general. This strand will get you up to speed with all the essential features of Canvas and introduce you to some the most commonly used instructor resources used at San Jose State University.

Multimedia and Content Development Track: This series is geared towards instructors wanting to focus on developing content for any of their courses. While not every workshop may be applicable, all of the workshops where you can learn how to create and edit multimedia content are listed here.

Adventurer Track: This track is for more experienced instructors who want to explore less commonly used technology tools or more advanced Canvas features.

The Experiential Track: Ever wanted to try something out before implementing it with your students in your real class? Then the experiential track is for you! These workshops are hands-on with participants enrolled in a demo course as a student. We consider the pedagogy of various Canvas teaching strategies and can see the teacher’s perspective visible on the overhead, but participants explore how the tools work from the perspective of a student on their own devices. Bring your questions!

Theory Track: The workshops in this track are geared towards instructional design and pedagogy.

Researcher Track: This track offers workshops that are specialized on research applications. As with the yellow track, not all of these may be applicable to you or your discipline. Any five choices satisfies this track.

Experienced Practitioners

Are you ready to move beyond the written essay and experiment with other forms of critical thinking work? You might be interested in the Writing Across the Curriculum workshop on:

Visual Rhetoric and the Alternative Research Project: Developing the Traditional Essay Into a Digital Short

Wednesday, February 20, 3:15PM-4:30PM, in Sweeney 229

There are four distinct objectives for the Alternative Research Project. The active engagement of knowledge building, composition, and research in a meaningful way. The presentation of research in an alternative mode. A creative project that emulates the traditional composition process. And finally, the publication and presentation of the project for public consumption. We begin with a discussion of the need for an understanding of Visual Rhetoric in a Visual World. This is grounded in knowledge building through the interpretation of meaning from an image based on: the arrangement of elements on the page, typography, and the analysis of images and visuals as data—unpacking ways to subjectively contextualize this data through the cultural, personal and temporal. This sets up our transition into a discussion on the three modes of Visual Literacy: Visual Thinking, both metaphoric and literal; Visual Learning, the intent, the meaning, and experience of the visual arrangement. Finally, connecting this discussion to the larger context of Visual Communication in different discourse communities for Art, Media, and Aesthetics. The practical component of the presentation will be a step-by-step breakdown of staging the Digital Short. First, we will briefly discuss the symmetry between the staging of the writing process (Topic Proposal, Outline, Annotated Bibliography, Rough Draft, Final Draft, Revising). Then, we will unpack the Digital Short in three parts: Process Letter, Photo Narrative, and Digital Short. Student samples will be provided for participants of the workshop.

Google Tour – Help with creating VR for your classroom

Interested in building or having your students build an immersive, 360 experience? Have you heard of Google Tour Creator? Join us on March 15 for a Google Tour information session followed by a hands-on, immersive experience. During the session, we will:

Provide information about Google Tour Creator

Explore ways to incorporate Google Tour Creator into the curriculum

Leverage related Google tools, such as Expeditions, Cardboard, and Poly

Provide an opportunity to build a Google Tour

Discuss and reflect on the experience

Friday March 15, 2019 | 10:00 – 11:30 a.m. | BBC 032

Light refreshments will be provided.

A List of Tools

In the meantime, if you need a tool associated with a particular task, check out the PBWorks DIRT collaborative review of many, many tools organized by tasks – so helpful, especially for those venturing into more advanced analysis using language analytical tools:

Until next time when I’ll discuss helping students read/annotate on digital platforms!

]]>http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/2019/02/18/but-how-do-i-begin-in-digital-pedagogy/feed/0It’s Not About the Tools: A Series of Digital Pedagogy Posts, Spring 2019http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/2019/02/11/digital_pedagogys19/
http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/2019/02/11/digital_pedagogys19/#respondTue, 12 Feb 2019 01:13:08 +0000http://blogs.sjsu.edu/ecampus/?p=293I’ve spent a lot of my career here at SJSU converting my research-oriented practices towards a more forward-facing collaboration with my students in project-centered learning environments. During my first forays into adventures with SJSU English and Composition students more than a decade ago, I taught the way that faculty had taught me at Cal State […]]]>

I’ve spent a lot of my career here at SJSU converting my research-oriented practices towards a more forward-facing collaboration with my students in project-centered learning environments. During my first forays into adventures with SJSU English and Composition students more than a decade ago, I taught the way that faculty had taught me at Cal State L.A. so many years ago: lectures with lots of interesting discussion centered around a novel or poem or philosophical musing. Grad school was like that, too, until I got into my dissertation area. And, I just assumed, even while teaching at multiple schools in the City University of New York system, that all students were as fascinated as I was about literature, culture, news, politics, the world. The CUNY students at Hostos Community College, Queens College, and Lehman College taught me differently, but in the throes of finishing a dissertation, living in the vibrancy of NYC, and moving across country for a job, I didn’t quite get it.

And, I didn’t quite get it when I arrived at SJSU an Assistant Professor in 2005, though I had just finished a traditional dissertation PLUS a project-based dissertation where my advisors let me roam around, ask questions, fail, and discover for myself. I hadn’t yet found a bridge to be able to facilitate that kind of learning…at least until Digital Humanities methodologies became much more transparent.

Digital Humanities is a field of inquiry positioned to pursue large questions in the Humanities in addition to providing access to inaccessible texts, and so much more. Wikipedia offers the clearest definition (and was authored by all of us Digital Humanists when it was first being formulated, debated, and discussed in 2010):

Digital humanities (DH) is an area of scholarly activity at the intersection of computing or digital technologies and the disciplines of the humanities. It includes the systematic use of digital resources in the humanities, as well as the reflection on their application.[1][2] DH can be defined as new ways of doing scholarship that involve collaborative, transdisciplinary, and computationally engaged research, teaching, and publishing.[3] It brings digital tools and methods to the study of the humanities with the recognition that the printed word is no longer the main medium for knowledge production and distribution.[3]

By producing and using new applications and techniques, DH makes new kinds of teaching and research possible, while at the same time studying and critiquing how these impact cultural heritage and digital culture.[2]Thus, a distinctive feature of DH is its cultivation of a two-way relationship between the humanities and the digital: the field both employs technology in the pursuit of humanities research and subjects technology to humanistic questioning and interrogation, often simultaneously.

Teaching these strategies while also providing full coverage for literature 1775-present was daunting because I would have to excise some literature in order to teach students how to use the digital tools, which, at that time, included blogging and other low-barrier entries into digital media uses. Through the years, I altered my view of Digital Humanities to suit SJSU’s mission statement.

What skills would digital tools afford them to learn in order to further their critical inquiry into the literature and literary historical periods?

After 8 years of toying around, I finally hit upon a pedagogy that married my praxis to the expectations for coverage and pedagogy at SJSU and, then, authored an article which grounds my theories about teaching at this particular institution and highlights my commitment to my students, my university, my Digital Humanities point of view: “Play, Collaborate, Break, Build, Share: ‘Screwing Around’ in Digital Pedagogy.” 3:3 (Fall 2013) Polymath Special Edition on “Doing Digital Pedagogy at a Non-R1.”

In recent conversations with colleagues across campus, I’ve been attempting to distill this pedagogy down to a few simple ideas that anyone can integrate no matter the discipline while also working on how to share the actual “stuff” of teaching — assignments, rubrics, syllabi, tools. For the past 8 years, I’ve been working on a collection of that teaching “stuff” as an editor of Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: a collection of pedagogical artifacts organized by keywords, each defined by a “curator” who then curates and annotates10 pedagogical artifacts to demonstrate teaching those concepts through digital methods. The project, which has been/will be completely open access to anyone, is currently available in the post-peer review GitHub repository awaiting its conversion into the new digital platform being built by our publisher, the Modern Language Association.

Jennifer Redd generously offered a space to blog about some of those Digital Pedagogy ideas this semester here in the eCampus space.

Here’s our first idea:

How do you teach project-based learning and collaboration?

This leads to our campus-wide initiative of late:

Can project-based learning incorporate faculty research goals? How?

In my field, recovery of inaccessible texts allows my courses to move beyond the traditional literary canon (of mostly white-male dominated writing). There’s an exponential number of 19th-century periodicals, journals, newspapers, poetry volumes, or novels. While Google Books, The Internet Archive, and HathiTrust have gone a long way towards providing free access to some of these “missing” texts, how do we teach students the research and then critical analysis skills to articulate these texts in conversation with the 19th-century literary canon? And, then, how do we facilitate, for instance, a digital exhibit or edition of these visual-heavy texts?

It’s a daunting endeavor, especially when teaching a 4-4 or even a 3-3 load.

The first step is not the tools, but instead to re-evaluate students as “learners.”

The next step is articulating a collaborative environment and meeting that student resistance with a cognitive revision away from “group work” (divide and conquer) ……into “teamwork” (an environment that enhances an idea of ticking off the assignment requirements).

…then, we offer then a different learning style

My adventures in implementing this teaching strategy, began in earnest in 2012 when I taught my first course in Digital Humanities in my Department. In Fall 2012, I wrote an excited post about Digital Humanities courses having been approved in my Department. One course didn’t make due to low enrollment, but the other course, the graduate course, went forward in Spring 2013. These 10 intrepid graduate students allowed me to experiment with them throughout the semester.

In Spring 2013, my department allowed me to teach a graduate seminar in Digital Humanities under the guise of Special Topics in Contemporary Theory. We threw out the syllabus on the first day because, quite frankly, I was bored of teaching Intro to Digital Humanities. Instead, I wanted them to make something, but they would have to get through the theory, define the project, educate themselves on history of the book and literary history topics, and grapple with issues of technology in a completely unfunded digital project. This, of course, made some of my colleagues anxious; but, I needed to see how this would work with our particular kinds of students.

Would they be interested in this type of collaborative, process-driven work?

Would they be engaged enough to drive the semester? It was certainly a bit scary for me and there are some changes that I will make for the next instantiation of this course, but overall, I was pleased.

…and then I was even more pleased.

At the conclusion of the semester, after writing a proposal for a Digital Humanities Center and drawing up the plans for the next version of this course, the students decided that a proper history of the project needed to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. A draft was put together and submitted to the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy because it focuses on DH and pedagogy in a way that other journals do not. We asked the editors to consider this a special type of article, one that highlights the student perspective in DH projects — not as trained monkeys, but those who are making decisions about a public project, not a one-off class project. Then it got difficult. Everyone scattered at the conclusion of the semester. But, three intrepid grad students stayed the course and worked with the JITP editors to create a history of this project that included all of the variables and tribulations of the decision-making process, including the materials unearthed by the original students who worked on the project for a year without academic credit or recognition. These original Beardstairs (as we call them), went to conferences, applied for university award, and generally performed DIY or guerilla DH. The Beardstair graduate course was a step towards codifying DH projects into our graduate curriculum. Students would get credit for this screwing around.

We were unconventional during the semester because it was the first instantiation of an introductory seminar in Digital Humanities in the graduate program that would afford a project-based environment. Instead, we broke the project and the semester into phases: research, development, building, and publication. By the building phase of the semester, we had decided on goals (both dream and realistic), dispensed with the normal grading scheme, ditched formal assignments, and added readings where the need arose from the previous week’s discussion. During this phase, we also used class time as project management sessions.

I took a very unconventional approach to grading and weekly writing. They kept a blog, but more importantly, they kept group blogs to demonstrate collaboration (something that’s extremely difficult to document). We ran into a snag with resources towards the beginning of the building phase, and it became apparent that it would be difficult to complete the project goals by semester’s end due to lack of IT resources on campus. We mulled over “Published Yet Never Done” in Digital Humanities Quarterly and revised our goals to reach a satisfactory collaborative benchmark for being “done” this semester. (And they collaborated with other grad students, including Matt Kirschenbaum’s students in University of Maryland.)

To satisfy the grading requirement for this semester, they assessed each other based on an extensive teamwork rubric. They already had a practice run at this so I could norm them to the process. At that point, each working group also had a frank conversation about each member’s working habits. That fixed some issues in one working group while highlighting the successful collaboration in another group.

I know I was doing some unconventional things with this course that might seem strange, but I wanted a chance to experiment with the course and pedagogical praxis. The students were all up for the challenge and have continued to be engaged in the material and the production. I also learned how we can do DH in our curriculum and with our limited resources. It won’t be as grand a version of DH as at Stanford, but I think we can do it if we scale back.

As a last reflection, I asked each of the participants to write a reflective post that ruminated on the success/failure of fulfilling the department’s student learning goals. A majority of the posts listed successes, but a few listed the failures – and this is where it was important to listen. One student noted that “collaboration” we practiced wasn’t the type that he had learned. He was looking for more discussion, more open dialogue about the raw materials. And, at some point, he became so frustrated that he stopped speaking up in the big group. Fair enough! We chatted about this at the conclusion of our last class; and it was at that point that others noted this difference too.

They all suggested during this meeting that the next instantiation of Beardstair, or any other DH course, should begin with lab sessions to learn HTML and then TEI (both mark-up languages used to generated text in a web page). They requested to learn these practical skills! Since then, I have integrated Lab Reports as assignments to report out on the acquisition of skills or knowledge.

Ideally, we would have completed the entire project and produced a digital scholarly edition. But early on, we noted that other than Omeka (and potentially Scalar), there are no out-of-the box platforms for producing a robust digital edition, at least not in the way that they wanted to visually represent these books. We also couldn’t get server space at SJSU, so one student (without informing me beforehand) purchased a domain name for a year for our use to experiment with some emerging digital tools out in beta.

The lengthy discussion that chased us all semester was about the underlying use of tools –

the tools signal an argument about the digital reconstruction of these 3 livre d’artiste books

In the class blog, students posted jointly and individually; I posted about pedagogy. But each week represents a list of tasks – it’s our raw working documents. Their struggles to articulate theory and assess the material object reflect the struggles we have in Digital Humanities at large. We added the task of writing a funding proposal for a Digital Humanities Center here at SJSU, complete with a list of required resources and cross-disciplinary collaborations.

And, finally, the participants decided that we needed something to mark the intellectual thought process of the semester – all of that stuff that often goes into the making any edition, the stuff that’s invisible. They submitted an article about the process to the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and wanted to submit a portion of the edition to Scholarly Editing.

They were struck by this idea of “completion” and failure.

What makes for a successful DH project?

Well, for this semester, that we didn’t complete the TEI mark-up and Omeka representations of The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde (1920 edition), Sebastian Van Storck written by Walter Pater and Illustrated by Alastair (1927), and The Ballad of a Barber by Aubrey Beardsley (1919 edition) wasn’t such a failure. And, if it was in the eyes of the departmental learning goals, then maybe it’s time that we revise our learning goals.

Karan Didwani and Chintan Vachhani are both eCampus student assistants who help the university’s faculty and student body with teaching tools such as Canvas, Turnitin, Clickers and many more. They graduated with Masters in Software Engineering this Fall and have big things awaiting them in the future. I asked both of them some questions about their Masters Project and about presenting their findings at the Project Expo here at San Jose State.

Chintan’s project focused on digital detection and decryption of a Sudoku puzzle using vision-based techniques. It is an Augmented Reality (AR) application that uses Computer Vision (CV) and Machine Learning (ML) to solve the Sudoku puzzle and convert it to an interactive AR representation. The AR app captures the puzzle image and sends it to the CV module. In turn, the CV module tries to detect the puzzle grid and if found, tries to recognize the digits present. It creates a 2D array representation of the puzzle and sends it to the ML module to solve it. The ML module consists of a Relational Recurrent Neural Network that is trained on 1M sudoku puzzles. It solves the given puzzle and returns a result to the CV module. Further, the CV module creates a sudoku image with the filled answer and forwards it to the AR app. In the end, the AR displays the solution image placed over the actual puzzle creating a magical augmented experience in real-time.

Witnessing the final product was really incredible as the app insistently found the answers to the sudoku puzzles. Chintan stated the most challenging part of the project was, “to integrate between AR (Unity3D, C#) and CV (Python, Flask, OpenCV) modules as they are two very different technology stacks”. A project he has been working on with his group-mates for a year is finally done and with it he says, “I feel satisfied becauseI was able to take upon a challenging project, learn new technologies and apply them to finish the project in time”. The biggest takeaways he feels were from this project were to always expect the unexpected and to always be innovative when solving sudden problems. Chintan hopes to use the skills and knowledge he acquired here in San Jose State to work for a tech company in small or big teams. Chintan states, “I hope to one day I wish to pursue entrepreneurship and run my own company”. No doubt he can make his dreams into reality for he always puts 100% in anything he does.

Karan’s project is a web application to allow its end users to carry out real estate sale online. It is not any ordinary ecommerce website because it is backed by one of the most talked about technology of this decade “ Blockchain”. In his project he and his group-mates stored all the transaction data and property data in a highly secure, encrypted distributed ledger or also known as blockchain. The complex encryption and availability of the data on distributed network makes the application almost impossible to hack and highly available in cases of failure. Karan mentioned he was happy that the end users don’t need to worry about all these technical complexities as everything is abstracted and served to them in a simple website just like Amazon or eBay.

Some obstacles Karan and his group-mates faced were conducting research on the Blockchain and its implementation was one of the hardest things we had to do in the project and time management. Blockchain technology is something that is new and just now getting traction so there is limited research done on it. Every project requires time sensitivity and having time management skills is essential in any setting. Like many San Jose State students, Karan had jobs and internships that required time and commitment which made it hard to focus on the project. Karan said, “since my team members and I, we all were doing internships and attending classes at the same time, finding time to focus on the project was a difficult thing to do. I was also doing my on-campus job at eCampus at that time. It was not about finding time to do it, it was more difficult to meet and discuss with each other”.

Karan has been working on this project for two semester and now that it is done he feels, “pretty excited and relaxed”. He feels like he has grown a lot since working on this project. He has learned the importance of time management and the value of effort. Karan recalls,”When all my friends watched Netflix, I pushed myself to watch online tutorials on Udemy and YouTube. With this I learnt how I can use almost 2 and half hour of my day for the project while carrying out my daily routine activities”. Since graduating he has joined PayPal as a full-time software engineer. He says, “I enjoyed my internships and my on-campus job, but now this is a different game so looking forward to it.”

We are all incredibly proud of both Chintan and Karan for their amazing accomplishments and wish them nothing but the best in their future endeavors. Thank you for all the work and time you put in helping the campus community. Stop by IRC-206, M-F, 9AM-5PM for any and all eCampus related questions.

This is a good follow up to Yingjie’s previous post about the upcoming Immersive Learning Institute for 2019. As I wrap up my thoughts on my conference experiences for this year, I’m most delighted that I was able to attend the sixth annual OpenSimulator Community Conference 2018 on December 8th and 9th. This was my second year attending this virtual world conference, and it allowed me to network with educators, artists, and others from around the world, all of whom are passionate about this open source alternative to a virtual worlds platform such as Second Life.

Presenting in a Virtual World

This was also my first time presenting in a virtual world! Originally I was to co-present with a colleague, Dr. Valerie Hill, the director of the Community Virtual Library (CVL). Valerie wasn’t able to attend, however, so it gave me the opportunity to introduce myself to this community, and tell them about CVL’s plans for a hypergrid resource library on two different virtual worlds that are using the OpenSimulator platform. As the project lead, my presentation included screenshots of the two buildings I’ve put in place where all our content and resources will be housed, along with the portals that allow for visitors to jump easily from one virtual world grid to another.

Hypergrid?! Hypergridding?!

Since the concept of hypergridding is likely to not be familiar to you, here’s a simple explanation. There are many virtual worlds built on OpenSimulator, and those worlds can be on anybody’s computer or server anywhere in the world. So if virtual worlds are like 3 dimensional websites, hypergridding is the protocol that allows a user to jump from “website” to “website”. Instead of just navigating the different pages of one virtual world, a visitor is empowered to travel from different computers or servers to another.

While there is a bit of a learning curve, and the technology is still kind of wonky, I think of open source virtual worlds and hypergridding as kind of a 2.0 mashup of the internet and social media. It’s every sci-fi geek’s dream – the emerging metaverse!

Augmented reality and virtual reality have been actively implemented in the classroom as innovative ways to engage students. Immersive learning is one of the fasted growing trends in education today. The 2018 OLC Accelerate conference provides a great opportunity for educators to discover such new technologies, tools, and trends in higher education. I presented at the conference and shared some insights on how to foster AR/VR community through the Immersive learning Institute. In Spring 2018, we hosted our first cohort for Immersive Learning Institute (ILI) with a group of adventurous faculty. Through the ILI, we gained valuable experiences on how to introduce AR/VR/MR/XR to faculty and engage them to create and integrate the immersive technologies into meaningful classroom activities. eCampus is pleased to offer our Spring 2019Immersive Learning Institute. The institute will focus on innovative Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technologies and pedagogies that create immersive learning opportunities to improve students’ engagement and critical thinking. The goal of the program is to provide a focused and supportive opportunity for faculty to explore AR/VR technologies and work closely with the AR/VR Specialist to create immersive learning activities for their courses. Upon successful completion of all components, participants will receive a badge and $500 professional development funds. Review the entireprogram description for complete program requirements and additional details. Submit your proposalonline by January 17, 2019.